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Substantial Performance Features Include 5% Solid Silver Conductors
AudioQuest Carbon Digital Coaxial cable offers substantial performance at an affordable price, boasting solid 5% silver conductors.
Carbon Digital Coaxial cable is designed to minimize distortion across an extremely wide bandwidth. For many applications, the speed of digital communication is important. Most visibly, "speed" is about transferring large files as quickly as possible, or carrying enough data for HD video.
For Digital Coax audio "speed" is critical not because of how-much how-fast, but because time relationships within a digital stream are critical to the reconstruction of the analog waveform that brings information, music and joy to our ears. Time-based damage (jitter) to this information within the data package makes the sound small and flat instead of 3D, harsh and foggy instead of smooth and clear.
"Tighter and Cleaner"
Comparing Carbon to two other Audioquest coaxial digital cables, Jaap Veentstra notes at alpha-audio.net, July 14, 2023, "The Carbon seems to blend the Cinnamon and Forest. It’s a bit tighter and cleaner than the Forest and fortunately brings stability again." A benefit he discovered is that "sharpness remains absent. But that is true of all Audioquest interlinks. A pleasant feature."
Solid 5% Silver Conductors
Solid conductors eliminate strand-interaction distortion and reduce jitter. Solid silver-plated conductors are excellent for very high-frequency applications. These signals, being such a high frequency, travel almost exclusively on the surface of the conductor. As the surface is made of high-purity silver, the performance is very close to that of a solid silver cable, but priced much closer to solid copper cable. This is an incredibly cost effective way of manufacturing very high-quality digital coax cables.
"It Literally Stopped Me in My Tracks"
Carbon Coaxial user stone7373 raves about this cable at r/audiophile, reddit.com, February 8, 2023. "I just swapped out the interconnect between my streamer and integrated amp to the AQ Carbon. It took two seconds to change the cable... when I finished, I hit ‘play’ on the streamer and started to walk back to my desk. The music started playing with my back turned to the speakers and it literally stopped me in my tracks. It took me a second standing there to figure out what the hell just happened to the sound."
"I wasn’t listening critically, or even really paying attention in general. I was actually thinking about the meeting i was about to join when the sound hit. The difference was THAT apparent."
Hard-Cell Foam Insulation
Hard-Cell Foam insulation is used exclusively in most of AudioQuest's video and digital audio cables. Similar to Foamed-PE, it is nitrogen injected to create air pockets. 'Hard' foam is used because the stiffness of the material allows the conductors in the cable to maintain the same relationship with each other along the full length of the cable, thus ensuring that the characteristic impedance of the cable is consistent.
100% Shield Coverage (Foil + Silver-Plated Braid)
Shielding always plays an important role in any cable design, but the shield on coax interconnect plays an especially important role because it functions not only as a shield but a return path as well. Because of this, AudioQuest pays special attention to the shield's metal quality and the fabrication techniques as both will affect the sound and the picture.
Carbon-Based Five-Layer Noise-Dissipation System (NDS)
100% shield coverage is easy. Preventing captured RF Interference from modulating the equipment's ground reference requires AQ's Noise-Dissipation System. Metal and Carbon-Loaded synthetics prevent most RFI from reaching the equipment's ground plane.
Terminations
Carbon is terminated with cold-welded, Hanging-Silver directly over pure Purple Copper.
